This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The multimedia container file format is an important element in the chain of multimedia content production, manipulation, transmission and consumption. There are substantial differences between the coding format (a.k.a. elementary stream format) and the container file format. The coding format relates to the action of a specific coding algorithm that codes the content information into a bitstream. The container file format comprises means of organizing the generated bitstream in such way that it can be accessed for local decoding and playback, transferred as a file, or streamed, all utilizing a variety of storage and transport architectures. Furthermore, the file format can facilitate interchange and editing of the media as well as recording of received real-time streams to a file.
Available media file format standards include ISO base media file format (ISO/IEC 14496-12), MPEG-4 file format (ISO/IEC 14496-14, also known as the MP4 format), AVC file format (ISO/IEC 14496-15) and 3GPP file format (3GPP TS 26.244, also known as the 3GP format). Other formats are also currently in development.
It is desirable that such media file formats enable the use of metadata. In many applications, such as reception and storage of media streams, such as audio and video streams, it is desirable that the file format enable the use of metadata that is specific to segments of the content of the streamed data to facilitate organization and access to desired sections or segments of the streamed data.